The Morlock Market

UNIX is not so much a product as it is a
painstakingly complied oral history of the hacker culture. It is
our Gilgamesh epic. UNIX is known, loved and understood by so many
hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone
needs it. This is very difficult to understand for people who are
accustomed to thinking of OSes as things that absolutely have to be
created by a company and bought.

I've been reading and rereading In the Beginning
Was the Command Line, a small book by Neal Stephenson
who is better known as the best-selling author of the novels
Snow Crash and
Cryptonomicon (the full text is also widely
available on the Web). In a general way, IBCL
is about the real-world verities of command-line computing: its
practical authenticities, its meritocratic culture, its
best-tool-for-the-job approach to building and fixing stuff; and
how much the GUI-using majority fails to comprehend even the
existence of a better, more fundamental way to use (and not just
“interact” with) computers.

But it's also about prophesy. There is an arc to Stephenson's
story, one that ends where it began, with the command line.
Command-line computing is not simple, he says. Nor is fixing a car
or building a house. “Life is a very hard and complicated thing,”
he concludes. “No interface can change that; and anyone who
believes otherwise is a sucker; and if you don't like having
choices made for you, you should start making your own.”

For the last fifteen years, the majority of the computing
population has chosen to let Microsoft make their choices for them.
Personally I believe Microsoft gets far too little credit for the
many positive aspects of this. The fact that they turned extremely
complicated processes and functions into moderately complicated but
extremely appealing products is a marketing triumph of the highest
order. Today it is no more possible to do business in the world
without touching Microsoft products than it is to find
transportation without internal combustion engines.

Worse, these products' frequent failures are legitimized by
ubiquitous acquiescence. Jeff Rankin says, “Imagine if every
Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This
happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining.”

Stephenson isolates at least two Faustian reasons for this.
One is humanity's fondness for mediated experiences. Witness the
success of Disney, which “does mediated experience better than
anyone,” Stephenson writes. “If they understand what OSes were,
and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or
two.” The other is that “we are way too busy, nowadays, to
comprehend everything in detail. And it is better to comprehend it
dimly, through an interface, than not at all.”

The key word is “everything”. Personal computing was born
with ambitions that far exceeded its abilities. Because it
could do just about anything, it
should do just about anything. And, amazingly,
there was more than sufficient demand for enough of “just about
anything” to justify and attract venture funding for software
start-ups by the multitude. But in the long run (which, again,
hasn't really been very long), only one company seemed to
understood exactly how much of everything
could practically be handled by a PC, and how to minimize the
inherent complications for the largest percentage of
everybody. However awful Microsoft may have
been in other ways, this comprehension alone is an achievement of
Roman dimensions.

The cultural result is what Stephenson calls “a two-tiered
system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H. G. Wells'
The Time Machine, except that it has been
turned upside down”. Here is his explanation:

In The Time Machine, the
Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean
Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our
world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority,
and they are running the show, because they understand how
everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they
know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and
controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could
be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so
we've evolved a popular culture that is almost unbelievably
infectious and neuters every person who gets infected by it, by
rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking
stands.

Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to comprehend
details, go out and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like
sensorial interfaces so that Eloi can get the gist without having
to strain their minds or endure boredom.

To be fair, Stephenson goes on to credit the positive social
effects of mediated experience:

The spectra of a policy controlled by the fads
and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant
differences between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that
professional wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to people
who don't. But then countries controlled via the command-line
interface, as it were, by double-domed intellectuals, be they
religious or secular, are generally miserable places to
live.

The cultural distinctions are interesting but frankly not
important. The real and important division is between makers and
users. Let's divide the computing world into three classes and look
at how the Morlocks and the Eloi sort out:

The desktop is Eloi territory. Apple conceived
it, Microsoft owns it, and most of us populate it. The server is a
bit of a mix. It's a Morlock business, but with a lot of Eloi
sensibilities. This is why Linux and Windows NT/2K are both growing
in absolute numbers and market share (and I want to be sure not to
insult the countless Morlocks who hack righteously both on and with
various Windows products). The embedded world is all Morlock. It
always was, and always will be.

The notion of a device that does everything is ludicrous in the
embedded world, which is comprised of nothing but specialties. The
embedded world also doesn't need fancy metaphors because nobody
wants a button or a dial to do “whatever”, depending on which
application is running. There is no “whatever” in the embedded
world. If you're dialing a radio or regulating a valve, you're
doing it on a device intended to do just that and not much more.

It turns out that Linux, by virtue of its small size, modular
form, familiarity and open-source code, is ideal for an infinitude
of single purposes. It's also exceedingly practical. This is why
the Morlocks will soon be hacking away at everything that can
conceivably benefit from Net-connected embedded intelligence. Since
this includes a vast amount of stuff, we can expect the Morlock
population to quickly grow in number, diversity and power. The
result will be a revolution far more profound and important than
personal computing.

For the suits among us, the most important question might be,
How long before Linux, which manifests as practical
specialization, makes personal computing as we know it
obsolete? In other words, when will it be easier and
faster to hack together (or buy, or both) a point-of-sale system
that runs on Linux, rather than cope with a third-party package
that has to run on crusty old Windows98? Or an accounting system
that does accounting and little more, but connects to the rest of
the world over TCP/IP and runs on reliable generic hardware?

Let's put it another way. How long before nobody
gets fired for specifying Linux because too many of the suits are
Morlocks?

Here's a good place to start: it's already that way at
IBM.

Doc Searls
(doc@ssc.com) is senior
editor of Linux Journal and coauthor of The
Cluetrain Manifesto.

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